BelDel Line (I think)

These pictures are blurry... taken by a 12 year old in 1948... but as that 12 yr old was my dad, I would really like to know where they were taken.

My guess is that this is an A5 switcher working the BelDel somewhere near Trenton. But, I would really love to hear from those who know better.

The first is the train along a canal...

http://knox.rrpicturearchives.net/showP ... id=1245845

Now a close up of the engine (I assume somewhere close by)

http://knox.rrpicturearchives.net/showP ... id=1245844

And finally, a shot of the whole train, with what may be a recognizable factory in the background.

http://knox.rrpicturearchives.net/showP ... id=1245843

Thanks for looking and thanks for your help.

Charles Freericks

There are those who feel full color million pixel digital pictures are all there is to photography. But its those old and fuzzy black and whites out of a box camera that reveal a lot more about what railroading was and was about. I do hope there are some Bel Del epxerts available to help descern these beautiful shots!

I'm thinking these shots were taken along what is now the Bordentown Secondary/River LINE heading south out of Trenton. Without more of the area in the photos, I can't give a definite answer.... anyone else care to venture a guess?

Those are Great Shots! Where was your father living back then? Typically, with the limited road network back then, I wouldn't expect a 12 yr old boy to be able to get too far from home, especially if he is lugging his father's camera around with him.

CJPat wrote:Those are Great Shots! Where was your father living back then? Typically, with the limited road network back then, I wouldn't expect a 12 yr old boy to be able to get too far from home, especially if he is lugging his father's camera around with him.

Blawenburg (between Skillman and Princeton)... but I think he used to get his mother to drive him around.

Trainlawyer... this is great! Thank you.

Much as I assume my dad was being driven... I think there is a picture from about the same time of him on a bike... so it's totally possible he biked there too.

My dad was a freshman at Princeton in 1953... you were both railfans and Tigers. I have a feeling you guys never met...

I see in the first picture that the canal is in the forefront with what appears to be the river a bit in the distance. Could this possibly be the Raritan Canal in the vicinity of Princeton with the line being the old PRR Main that ran from Monmouth Jnctn thru Kingston to Princeton and down to Trenton?. The Princeton area isn't that much of a haul from Blawenburg. As far as the factory is concerned, could that be possibly closer to Kingston? I don't have any hard knowldege of the way things were set up back then. I am just throwing it out for speculation.

Riding bikes back then was nothing. In the 50's we'd ride from Denville to Rockaway, Hibernia, Meridan, etc. or to Dover adn Wharton, or over to Boonton and down to Morristown. Yeah we were 10 to 15 years old at the time, but it was nothing to ride bikes around and no one seemed the worse for wear. It is almost as if the boogie man had not been invented yet. Later on I thought nothing of hitch hiking all over the place, too. None of that can, or ought to be, done today.

To the pics. I would assume they were taken with a box camera or Brownie or maybe a Kodak folding camera? Nothing too heavy to lug around, especially on a bike. For what it's worth, my gut feeling when first seeing the pics hit me as being near Lambertville based on the canal.

Not to go too far OT (because I'd really love to nail down the location of these shots!), but when I was a kid in the 1970s, we rode bikes everywhere... all of my early railfanning was on a bike... including places as far from my home in Paramus as Montvale, Demerest, Little Ferry, HoHoKus and Saddle Brook.

Lambertville pops into my mind as the most likely area. Maybe just MAYBE Trenton, but my guess is Lambertville.

1953 my dad would have just turned 18 (early 1948 he was 12). The family moved from Blawenburg to Princeton Township in 1949 and he also did go to Princeton High School. He graduated from the University in 1957 and went to work, ironically, for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

I do have some Princeton Jct pictures of his, although most of them are far worse than these Bel Del shots. Go to http://knox.rrpicturearchives.net/archi ... x?id=28461 and then scroll down about ten shots to see a couple of them.

He was Charley Freericks (with that spelling). His parents called him Chris, however, so it's possible he still introduced himself as Chris in the early 1950s. They lived on State Road, where my dad had planned to build a model railroad structure out of cinder block, but never got around to it. I believe he sold all his Lionel around 1950 and made the switch to Varney. I still have most of his Varney stuff.

His mom (my grandmother) worked for Skillman & Skillman real estate and I think she would drive him around to locations that were too far to bike to. He actually did not take a lot of pictures. Even when I had become a full-blown railfan, shooting off roll after roll in the 1970s, he would come with me and maybe take a picture or two... sometime none at all.

I don't see any lettering on the chimney. The engine number ends in 87. I can't tell what the first number is (Maybe a 3?).

The next two pictures on the roll are pretty obviously a Reading line (from the cat)... double track. There's no train in the images, but I would guess somewhere near West Trenton (where it became double track). If that is correct, Lambertville makes a lot of sense, if one was to assume the images were taken the same day.

Someone on another list said that the space to the right of the train indicates there was once a yard there, which also made them lean to Lambertville. My only question on the old main (which would be really cool) is even if it still existed in 1948, would it have had a B6 on it, which I've been told was proably Camden based power?

Update from another list... but an interesting twist...

Someone posted that the images of the engine close up are at Montgomery Street, north of Trenton and that the picture across the canal was at Dix Hills (now Sullivan Way?).

Looking at the locations on Google Sat, they look very close.

There's really no way to tell what the order was. The negatives are cut in individual frames, and though there are some slight variations in the cuts, they are all straight enough that I can't piece them back together. In fact, there are a group of PRR images at the Trenton station that may be part of the same batch (I doubt this a little though, as those pictures are in the album with full captions written, and these images are a few pages later with nothing written.)

There are no frame numbers on the negatives.

On the math... I actually had to figure it out a couple times after you questioned it to make sure I was right... ... What really scared me is the realization that my now 12 & 1/2 year old is only 5 years from college!

My dad was not ROTC, no... he was on the Cross Country Team for at least two years and was the manager of it at least one more year.

Every single year he took us to Reunions and the P-Rade (a tradition my brother, class of 85, continues).

My dad was in the Army just before I was born, but I believe he was simply drafted and it had nothing to do with school.

Trainlawyer, tell me more about the EQuad girders. (P.U. eng'g grad in the late 70's).
JS